Cydia

Since the keyboard in iOS is something that we interact with multiple times every day, it seems like a very good place for improvement in terms of functionality. A new jailbreak tweak called SwipeExpander is now available in Cydia by iOS developer Jerry En that adds configurable swipe shortcuts to your iOS keyboard.

SwipeExpander can be configured in the way you want to use it. You can configure inserting specific text, performing actions, or showing a menu full of options by swiping up or down on any of your iOS keyboard keys. The appearance of the keyboard looks much like AltKeyboard 2, but on the functionality side of things, they're completely different tweaks with different feature sets.

SwipeExpander adds a preferences pane to the Settings application where you can begin customizing its various options to your liking:

From here, you can configure your keyboards, hide or show letter case, names of keys, and previews, and even adjust the sensitivity of your keys for when you swipe up or down on them. There's also an option here to prevent Control Center from opening when you're swiping up on keys on the keyboard, and various sliders for adjusting things such as the opacity, size, landscape size, position, landscape position, character position, and landscape character position.

From the sensitivity options, you can set a custom sensitivity level for your keyboard keys to help ensure that you don't accidentally perform an action that you didn't mean to perform:

You can pick from:

Very low

Low

Medium

High

Very high

From the keyboards options, you can configure the keyboards that you have enabled so that the insertion of text, actions you want to perform, and menus that you want to configure will happen exactly the way you want them to:

There are many pre-set options and you can add or remove from the presets. If you want to add a new one, you will be presented with an interface where you must set a name for the option, configure an action for swiping up on the keyboard key, configure an option for swiping down on the keyboard key, and finally, assign the functions to the key.

You can see all of the function options you can pick from below:

You can make swiping up on a keyboard key or swiping down on a keyboard key do any of the following things:

Insert text

Open menu

Select

Select All

Cut

Copy

Paste

Undo

Redo

Delete forward

Delete word

Dismiss auto-correct

Dismiss keyboard

Define

Toggle caps lock

Toggle word case

Move caret to beginning

Move caret to end

Move caret up

Move caret down

Move caret left

Move caret right

Insert last photo

Open Control Center

Open App Switcher

From a first glance, it would seem that SwipeExpander is a very usable extension for the keyboard in iOS 7, and if you want to make the keyboard more usable, then SwipeExpander is definitely a great option for you. It's worth mentioning that the tweak is compatible with several other keyboard-enhancing jailbreak tweaks, such as SwipeSelection, SwipeSelection Pro, PredictiveKeyboard, DismissMyKeyboard, and KeyShortcut.

If you would like to give SwipeExpander a try, it's available right now in Cydia's BigBoss repository for $1.50. iOS 7 is required for the installation, but the tweak supports all iPhones, iPod touches, and iPads.